


In Her Dreams

by regenderate



Series: Fanzine Prompts [11]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23481964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: Every night, the Doctor sees old friends and enemies alike in her dreams. It's a bittersweet blessing.--Piece from the first Thirteen Fanzine.
Series: Fanzine Prompts [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1386823
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	In Her Dreams

She’s running through a pitch dark room, a warm hand in hers. There’s a light in the distance, and they’re running towards it, and it gets bigger and bigger until suddenly she’s falling, and she loses her grip, and she panics.

And then she wakes up.

This is how the Doctor dreams.

She goes to the TARDIS kitchen, where Yaz and Ryan are experimenting with her fancy coffee machine, and pretends she’s fine. Pretends she’s not still in the world of the dream.

But every time she falls asleep, she dreams. Again and again and again. She sees her old friends, she sees her new friends, she sees her enemies. Sometimes the dreams are good, happy, sweet, but more often they’re nightmares.

She dreams Rose Tyler, trying so hard to hang on to the universe, and then later, on the beach, but on the beach she’s angry and shifts into the shape of a monster and the Doctor wakes up and has to ask the TARDIS what really happened (not that the answer cheers her).

She dreams Bill Potts as a cyberman with oily tears leaking out of her metal eyes, and Missy laughing in the background.

She dreams the Ponds, Amy and Rory, being chased down by a weeping angel, an angel that for some reason the Doctor can see move but cannot stop. She dreams the moment the angel touches them. In the dream, their flesh falls away and turns to dust, and the earth swallows their skeletons, and their gravestone grows around them, and then it’s just the Doctor, standing alone.

She wakes up gasping, with tears on her face.

She knows Ryan and Graham and Yaz think she doesn’t rest enough. She doesn’t need as much sleep as them, but she does need more than she gets--not that she tells them that.

“I’m fine,” she says, when they give her concerned looks and soft suggestions. “Don’t need much sleep, me.”

She knows they don’t believe her. But what can they do? They can’t  _ make _ her sleep.

The four days of unconsciousness after the sonic mine goes off are the worst. She dreams about her new team dying in every possible way-- the sonic mine killing them all, Daleks showing up and blasting them to bits, the TARDIS landing somewhere toxic to humans and them not noticing until it was too late. The dreams shift and blend into each other, and in every one, the Doctor watches as they die, and she does not wake up until it’s too late.

Of course, the minute they get back to the TARDIS everyone is pestering her to get some rest.

“You’re hurt,” Yaz says. “You need to rest, Doctor.”

But the Doctor does not rest. She stays in the console room and tinkers with the TARDIS until she falls asleep right there on the floor, forehead resting in a puddle of oil. 

She dreams about Yaz hating her. She dreams about Ryan and Graham dying in a horrible battle and Yaz leaving the TARDIS forever.

She wakes up, grease on her face, still holding a wrench in one hand, to see Yaz standing over her, concerned.

“Come on, Doctor,” she says. “Let’s get you to a real bed.”

For once, the Doctor doesn’t argue. She  _ is _ tired, and her ectospleen still hurts, and Yaz is so gentle, and the Doctor can’t summon the energy to resist.

Yaz takes off her jacket and tucks her into bed and leaves, and the Doctor falls asleep and dreams about a picnic in a field full of flowers with all her friends, Yaz, Ryan, and Graham but also Martha and Rose and River and everyone else she’s loved. She wakes up smiling, for once.

Her friends don’t stop trying to get her to sleep. It doesn’t help, she knows, that she’s always falling asleep anywhere but her own bed-- they find her in the library with a book on her chest or slumped at the base of the console or at the kitchen table with a cold cup of black tea. Sometimes they go about their business quietly and leave her; other times, she wakes up in her own bed, a cup of chamomile tea next to her, somehow always hot. 

It’s the good dreams that really get her, sometimes. She’ll fall asleep in the TARDIS greenhouse tending to her plants and suddenly Rose is there, and they’re taking care of the plants together, hands overlapping, grinning at each other the way they used to back when the Doctor had just regenerated and was falling in love again. She wakes up, still on the floor, and as she gets up a part of her is waiting for Rose to come back and help her finish until she remembers.

Yaz asks about it when the whole gang is hanging out in the game room, playing a video game together. The Doctor makes some sort of brag about how she’s going to beat everyone, Ryan says, “In your dreams,” and Yaz gets a pensive look on her face and asks, “ _ Do _ you dream, Doctor?”

The Doctor is pushed completely out of the moment.

“Everyone dreams,” she says, suddenly very aware of the angle of her hands on the controller. “Suppose I can dream with the best of them.”

“Whoa,” Ryan says. “Doctor dreams. Wonder what those are like.”

The Doctor doesn’t answer.

“Bet you and Graham couldn’t beat me and Yaz at teams,” she says, nodding to the television.

“Oh, you’re on,” Ryan says, and all talk of dreams is forgotten.

But that night, when Ryan and Graham go to bed, Yaz stays in the game room with the Doctor. She asks if the Doctor wants to play something else, and the Doctor agrees. It isn’t until their fourth game that she realizes something’s off: Yaz usually goes to bed long before Ryan and Graham.

“Shouldn’t you go to bed?” she asks. “Don’t want to be tired tomorrow, you know. Big day. Well, always a big day, in the TARDIS.”

She’s rambling. Yaz looks at her, and the Doctor gets a sinking feeling in her chest. She tries so, so hard to avoid this sort of conversation.

“I wanted to make sure you got some sleep,” Yaz says. 

“I don’t need much sleep,” the Doctor answers. “I’ll just get a few hours in later.”

“I used to get nightmares when I was a kid,” Yaz says. “I would stay up forever just so I wouldn’t have to dream. And then I’d fall asleep in school the next day because I was so tired. I’ve found you asleep in every room on this ship. You need to sleep in a bed, Doctor.”

“Don’t want to,” the Doctor replies. “I’m fine without. Really.”

“You’re not,” Yaz says. “You don’t have to tell me why or anything. I know you don’t like to talk about yourself. But-- you have to sleep sometime.”

The Doctor sits in silence, thumbs hovering over the video game controller, hoping that if she doesn’t say anything Yaz will just go away.

“I’ll stay with you,” Yaz says. “Whether you sleep or not. If that helps.”

It does and it doesn’t, but the Doctor doesn’t say that. She just says, “You don’t have to do that.”

“You’re right,” Yaz says. “I don’t.” But she doesn’t move. She looks at the screen. “Want to play again?”

Somewhere between their fifteenth and sixteenth game, the Doctor feels herself nodding off. By the twentieth, she’s barely conscious, and she’s completely asleep before they get to the twenty-second.

She dreams that she and Yaz are playing the same game, on the same couch, but then the monster in the game comes out of the TV and launches itself at Yaz--

And then she wakes up, still on the same couch, Yaz shaking her by the shoulder.

She can’t decide if that makes it better or worse. 

Somehow, her nightmares are never about something bad happening to  _ her _ . It’s always something bad happening to her friends while she watches, something happening that she can’t stop, something happening that she causes. She has one where she kisses River and then pushes a sonic screwdriver through her heart-- she wakes up with River’s frozen features engraved in her mind’s eye. That’s one of the worst, really, but dreams like that aren’t uncommon. She has one where she plants a sonic mine and steps back as Ryan, Graham, and Yaz come closer, waking up just before the explosion, and she has a long, convoluted one in which Graham dies at a resort somewhere deep in space during an alien invasion and she has to organize a funeral. She has another where she sees Martha Jones again only to see her immediately struck by lightning-- her dreams have gotten less creative, she notes when she wakes up, but no less distressing.

She knows Yaz has told Ryan and Graham what’s happening. More and more often, they’re waking her up when they find her sleeping in strange places, and more often than not, they wake her up mid-nightmare. She’s grateful, and she’s even more grateful that no one’s mentioned it since that night with the video games. 

And it isn’t all bad. She dreams arriving on New Earth with Rose, lying back on her coat and looking at the stars, except she’s in her newest body and Rose is a little older, the way the Doctor imagines her being in the parallel universe. She dreams being with Donna again, Donna seeing her and hugging her and knowing who she is. She dreams hugs from Yaz and fist bumps from Ryan. Sometimes she gets them in real life, too. She still gets far too many nightmares, but it’s made a little more bearable when she remembers the good parts, the happiest of times with the people she’s loved most. 

She still always wakes up a little sad. The people in those dreams are dead, or sometimes haven’t been born yet, or maybe are hurtling towards death, and there will come a time when she won’t hope to see them again. 

And it’s hard-- she has to remember, sometimes, that even though she will outlive her friends, she is loved  _ now _ , and if she tries really hard, and does her absolute best, she might even be worthy of that love. Even in her dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> literally this was in the thirteen fanzine, like, a year ago and we were allowed to post our pieces after they stopped selling the zine but I just... didn't? or at least i don't think so, there's always the chance i did and forgot and now i've done it twice. anyway today I finished my piece for the next zine and remembered this so this is just a reminder to everybody to check out thirteenfanzine.tumblr.com and also @thirteenfanzine on twitter if you want some quality thirteen content.


End file.
